LITERARY STYLE No one have read Miss Kellers autobiography without feeling that she writes unusually fine English. Any teacher of position knows that he bring his pupils to the point of writing without errors in syntax or in the choice of words. It is just this accuracy which Miss Kellers early education fixes as the point to whiy healthy child be brought, and which the analysis of that education ats for. Those who try to make her an exception not to be explained by any sualysis of her early education, fortify their position by an appeal to the remarkable excellence of her use of language even when she was a child.
This appeal is to a certain degree valid; for, ihose additional harmonies of language aies of thought which make style are the gifts of the gods. No teacher could have made Helen Keller sensitive to the beauties of language and to the finer interplay of thought which demands expression in melodious wroupings.
At the same time the inbift of style be starved or stimulated. No innate genius i fine language. The stuff of which good style is made must be given to the mind from without and given skilfully.
A child of the muses ot write fine English unless fine English has been its nourishment. In this, as in all other things, Miss Sullivan has been the wise teacher. If she had not had taste and ahusiasm food English, Helen Keller might have been brought up on the "Juveerature," which belittles the language under pretense of being simply phrased for children; as if a childs book could not, like "Treasure Island" or "Robinson Crusoe" or the "Jungle Book," be in good style.
If Miss Sullivan wrote fine English, the beauty of Helen Kellers style would, in part, be explicable at once.
But the extracts from Miss Sullivaers and from her reports, although they are clear and accurate, have not the beauty which distinguishes Miss Kellers English. Her service as a teacher of English is not to be measured by her own skill in position. The reason why she read to her pupil so many good books is due, in some measure, to the fact that she had so retly recovered her eyesight. When she became Helen Kellers teacher she was just awakening to the good things that are in books, from which she had been shut out during her years of blindness.
In Captain Kellers library she found excellent books, Lambs "Tales from Shakespeare," aer still Montaigne. After the first year or so of elementary work she met her pupil on equal terms, and they read and enjoyed good books together.
Besides the sele of good books, there is oher cause for Miss Kellers excellen writing, for which Miss Sullivan deserves unlimited credit. That is her tireless and uing discipline, which is evident in all her work. She never allowed her pupil to send off letters which tained offenses against taste, but made her write them over until they were not only correct, but charming and well phrased.
Any one who has tried to write knows what Miss Keller owes to the endless practice which Miss Sullivan demanded of her. Let a teacher with a liking food style insist on a childs writing a paragraph over and ain until it is more than correct, and he will be training, even beyond his own power of expression, the power of expression in the child.
How far Miss Sullivan carried this process of refi aion is evident from the humorous ent of Dr. Bell, that she made her pupil a little old woman, too widely different from ordinary children in her matu